The Charles E. Merriam Award was established by the Association to recognize a person whose published work and career represent a significant contribution to the art of government through the application of social science research. First presented in 1975, the award was revived in 1995 and is presented biennially. This year, our winners are Douglas Rivers and Donna Shalala.

Secretary Donna E. Shalala is notable both as a dedicated public servant and as a scholar committed to advancing public service.

She began her contributions to public service in her formative scholarly writings about public finance. Serving as secretary to the “Big MAC,” the Municipal Assistance Corporation that managed to pull New York City out of its budget crisis in the 1970s, Shalala was able to put her academic research into action. After serving as Assistant Secretary for Policy Development and Research at the US Department of Housing and Urban Development, 1977-1980, she was appointed as President of Hunter College, City University of New York. From there, she became Chancellor of the University of Wisconsin, where she served until called in 1993 to become Secretary of the US Department of Health and Human Services, a post she held throughout the Clinton Administration, until 2001. At that point, she became president of the University of Miami, a post she held until recently; she currently heads the Clinton Foundation.

An unflagging supporter of expanding opportunities for everyone in society, Shalala has focused as a scholar on health and educational opportunities, on advancing equality for women, and on support for veterans. She made a federal response to AIDS a focus while at Health and Human Services. And she remains a supporter of the public role of research in the social sciences to advance public causes. Like Charles Merriam, both as a scholar and public official, then, Donna Shalala has embodied the commitment to academic and public service that we honor with this Award.

Professor Douglas (Doug) Rivers is also honored by the award in recognition of the outstanding role he has played over the past thirty years as innovator and entrepreneur in pushing forward new strategies in survey methodology, field experimentation, data accessibility, research sustainability and empirical interpretation. He has innovated methods and data sources that are essential to the subsequent work of multiple generations of scholars in such fields as public opinion analysis, election studies and congressional politics, particularly through his roles in helping to create and expand Knowledge Networks (with Norman Nie) and Polimetrix,.

Additionally, as scholar, teacher, collaborator and reviewer, he has helped to clarify and demonstrate the ways in which new methods and data can address critical issues in the interpretation of data, and thus in the understanding of politics, that previous scholars lacking such methods and data were forced to ignore.

Charles Merriam was noted for his commitment to innovative political and social science scholarship, and for his consequent efforts in founding the Social Science Research Council to foster such research. As innovator, scholar, entrepreneur and teacher of the first order, Doug Rivers clearly follows in Merriam’s footsteps and is richly deserving of the Merriam Award.

The John Gaus Award and Lectureship honors the recipient’s lifetime of exemplary scholarship in the joint tradition of political science and public administration and, more generally, recognizes and encourages scholarship in public administration.

Paul C. Light is the recipient of the 2015 John Gaus Award and Lectureship, which honors a lifetime of exemplary scholarship in the joint tradition of political science and public administration. Light is currently the Paulette Goddard Chair of Public Service at New York University’s Robert F. Wagner Graduate School of Public Service and founder of the Global Center for Public Service. His prior positions include vice president for governmental studies and Douglas Dillon Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution, director of the Public Policy Program at the Pew Charitable Trusts, and associate dean at the Hubert H. Humphrey School of the University of Minnesota.

The letter nominating Light described his body of research as “focusing the disciplinary lens of political science on enduring questions of public administration.” Indeed, Light has an outstanding and prolific record of scholarship on government at the intersection of public administration, political science, and public policy, with research on bureaucracy, civil service, Congress, entitlement programs, the executive branch, government reform, nonprofit effectiveness, organizational change, and the political appointment process. He has authored 20 academic books, 4 books that translate issues for more general audiences, and scores of peer-reviewed articles, book chapters, and research reports.

This research has earned frequent recognition from his peers. Light is a winner of three book awards, including the 2010 Herbert Simon award for A Government Ill Executed: The Decline of the Federal Service and How to Reverse It, and two Louis Brownlow Book Awards from the National Academy of Public Administration, for The Tides of Reform: Making Government Work, 1945–1994 and Thickening Government: Federal Hierarchy and the Diffusion of Accountability. His dissertation on the president’s agenda and domestic policy choice, which later appeared in print in three editions, won the E. E. Schattschneider Award from APSA.

In addition to his intellectual leadership in universities and research institutes, Light has also made important contributions to public service throughout his career. From his time as a staff member of the US Senate Committee on Governmental Affairs, he has actively worked to communicate research to policymakers. He has given testimony before Congress on 27 separate occasions and has served on high-level national commissions, the National Commission on the American State and Local Public Service (Winter Commission), and the National Commission on the Public Service (Volcker Commission). Currently, he is a senior advisor for the Volcker Alliance, a senior fellow of the Governance Institute, and a fellow of the National Academy of Social Insurance and the Center for Excellence in Government. A fellow of the prestigious National Academy of Public Administration, Light was the 2007 Elmer Staats Lecturer for NAPA. He has also served on boards and task forces for the Association of Public Policy and Management and the National Association of Schools of Public Affairs and Administration.

The committee is pleased to honor Light’s many scholarly accomplishments and distinguished service with the 2015 John Gaus Award.

Award Committee:
Karen Mossberger, Arizona State University
Norma Riccucci, Rutgers University
Gene Brewer, University of Georgia

James C. Scott of Yale University is this years winner of The Benjamin E. Lippincott Award. This award was established by the Association to recognize a work of exceptional quality by a living political theorist that is still considered significant after a time span of at least 15 years since the original date of publication.

James C. Scott’s Seeing Like a State is a magisterial work of exceptional quality. By compelling us to conceptualize state agency as predicated on creating a certain sort of “legible” knowledge about its subjects and environment, it has transformed our understanding of the nature of state authority and power. While the book has been highly influential across many areas of political science, and its author is at home in the wider discipline and in a number of related disciplines as well, we consider his voice in the central argument of this book (presented and honed originally in articles in prominent political theory publications) to have had an enduring significance for political theory in particular. Indeed this work demonstrates the value of political theory that is drawn out of meditation on exempla from a very wide range of contexts, comparative and historical. While the general form of the contrast between particular knowledge and oversimplifying generalizations, and the role of states in imposing those generalizations to the detriment of genuine social life, had been previously observed, Scott’s framing of the issue revealed how the very effort by states to produce knowledge of certain privileged kinds can also disable other crucial kinds of memory, insight, and political possibility. Seeing Like a State remains the indispensable source on the subject; we regard it as a classic work of political theory in our time.

Award Committee:
Melissa Lane, Princeton University
Bob Goodin, The Australian National University, Canberra
Robert Gooding-Williams, Columbia University

Recipient:
James C. Scott, Yale University. Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (Yale University Press, 1998)

Mary Fainsod Katzenstein, Stephen and Evalyn Milman of Cornell University, and K.C. Morrison of Mississippi State University are this years winner for the Frank J. Goodnow Award.

The Goodnow Award recognizes distinguished service to the profession and the Association, by necessarily a career of scholarship. This service may be by individuals, groups, and public and private organizations who have played a role in the development of the political science profession and the building of the American Political Science Association. Congratulations Mary Fainsod Katzenstein and K.C. Morrison!

The Frank Johnson Goodnow Award was established by the APSA Council in 1996 to honor service to the community of teachers, researchers, and public servants who work in the many fields of politics. Frank J. Goodnow, the first president of the American Political Science Association, a pioneer in the development of judicial politics, and former president of Johns Hopkins University, is an exemplar of the public service and volunteerism that this award represents.

Dr. Mary Katzenstein’s career, combining the highest caliber of scholarship and the strongest commitment to public service, thoroughly exemplifies the spirit of the Goodnow award. Her nineteen nominators from all over the US, the United Kingdom, and Australia, wrote evocatively of one of her most notable contributions: her creation of the Cornell Prison Education Program and Felon Rights. Of this extraordinary work, through which Dr. Katzenstein puts her knowledge and experience at the service of convicted felons who seek education, Mary has said this:

Part of my career has been aimed at demonstrating (post tenure!) that “engaged learning” can play a significant role in the construction of political science as a discipline … and to service to the ‘profession’ broadly construed…. I have tried to ‘demonstrate’ that it is possible as a scholar … to work to disseminate the study of politics and other disciplines outside a narrow definition of the academy….[W]hat has been most gratifying about this work is to be able to demonstrate that it is possible to establish an educational program, to find funding (the program began on a shoe string and now raises about $200,000 a year), and to involve large numbers of both Cornell students and “prison” students in an ambitious degree program.

Her integration of this exceptional public service with her scholarship has been recognized in recent years by the APSA’s Heinz Eulau Award Committee, who gave her and her colleagues the Eulau Award for the best article published in Perspectives on Politics in 2011…just one example of her commitment to representing the finest aspirations of our discipline by using rigorous scholarship to benefit the commonweal and the most vulnerable citizens among us.

Minion Kenneth Chauncey “KC” Morrison, Professor and Head, Department of Political Science and Public Administration, Mississippi State University

“KC” Morrison has honored our discipline by the scholarship in African American Studies and the politics of race he has disseminated in books, journal articles, films, and even exhibition catalogues. His nominators from among his former colleagues in the University of Missouri system, current colleagues at Mississippi State, as well as former students, note that an even greater contribution as an “ambassador for the discipline” is his wide-ranging, tireless mentorship of students.

Whether he was taking Missouri students to the Unviersity of Ghana or or teaching Ghanaian students in Africa, being the kind of administrator who worked to create institutions to serve students well, mentor doctoral students, or steadfastly motivating undergraduate students to pursue careers in political science, Dr. Morrison has been the kind of professional for whom the Goodnow Award was created.

Some of his career recognitions – including the University of Missouri Faculty Alumni Award, a Diversity Enhancement Award, a Martin Luther King Community Award from Columbia, Missouri, and a Barbara Jordan Leadership Award from the Big Eight Conference, recognize his contributions to broadening and deepening our understanding of race and politics through scholarship, teaching, mentorship, and public service. Dr. Morrison has enriched our discipline by his own work and by bringing successive generations of students to the field.

Award Committee:
Susan Tolleson-Rinehart, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
Tony Affigne, Providence College
Martha Joynt-Kumar, Towson State University

Our winner for APSA’s Distinguished Teaching Award is John Ishiyama. This award honors the outstanding contribution to undergraduate and graduate teaching of political science at two- and four-year institutions. The contribution may span several years or an entire career, or it may be a single project of exceptional impact.

The APSA Distinguished Teaching Award honors the outstanding contribution to undergraduate and graduate teaching of political science at two- and four-year institutions. The contribution may span several years or an entire career, or it may be a single project of exceptional impact. The award carries a $1,000 prize.

The award was created on the recommendation of APSA’s Teaching and Learning Committee and has been endowed through generous gifts from APSA members. It signals the central role of teaching in the profession.

It is with great delight that this year’s committee recognizes John T. Ishiyama, University Distinguished Research Professor of Political Science at the University of North Texas, as the 2015 APSA Distinguished Teaching Awardee. Although we received impressive nominations, the committee agreed that John Ishiyama was most deserving of this award in recognition of his outstanding record of care, concern, and craft. A nationally and internationally acclaimed scholar and leader, his record demonstrates great love for teaching and mentoring as well as outstanding commitment to scholarship and service.

Ishiyama’s foundational work and leadership within APSA has helped build important infrastructure to promote Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, enhanced research on teaching and learning, and left a strong legacy for future educators. He served as founding editor-in-chief of the Journal of Political Science Education from 2004 until 2012, when he assumed the role of lead editor of the American Political Science Review. He was one of the founders and architects of the APSA Teaching and Learning Conference, an important conference that equips and encourages political science educators around the world. His impressive range of pedagogical articles, papers, and monographs testify to his commitment to elevating teaching in the discipline. His wide range of accomplishments also includes directing undergraduate research programs, securing grants to fund research and mentoring programs, and serving in leadership roles with the APSA Teaching and Learning Committee and Pi Sigma Alpha.

It is likely little surprise that Ishiyama has received many awards for his teaching, research, and mentoring. His recognitions include the Ronald E. McNair Program Outstanding Service Award, the Ulys and Vera Knight Faculty Mentor Award, the APSA Political Science Education Distinguished Service Award, the Quincy Wright Distinguished Scholar Award, the Carnegie Foundation US Professor of the Year for Missouri, the Missouri Governor’s Award for Teaching Excellence, and the William O’Donnell Lee Advising Award. It is an honor for us to add the 2015 APSA Distinguished Teaching Award to these many accolades.

The Hubert H. Humphrey Award is awarded annually in recognition of notable public service by a political scientist.

Beverly Scott holds a PhD in political science from Howard University and has spent the last 30 years in leadership positions in the world of public transportation. Most recently, she served as general manager and CEO of Atlanta’s Metropolitan Atlanta Rapid Transit Authority (MARTA) and then as general manager and CEO of Boston’s Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority (MBTA). Throughout her career, Scott has demonstrated courageous leadership, balancing the demands of myriad stakeholders both within and outside of the organizations she has led, taking on controversial issues and deftly confronting her political adversaries. She has been a strong and compelling voice for transportation equity. Her leadership has been recognized through numerous awards and honors. Scott was recently nominated by President Obama to serve on the National Transportation Safety Board. The committee believes her record of distinguished public service, built on her training and background as a political scientist, makes Scott an exemplary candidate for the Hubert H. Humphrey Award.

The E.E. Schattschneider prize is awarded annually for the best doctoral dissertation completed and accepted during that year or the previous year in the field of American government.

Danielle M. Thomsen’s dissertation focuses on two seemingly unrelated questions and their intersection. First, she examines patterns of candidate emergence to the US Congress and its relationship to party polarization. Second, she examines how candidate emergence relates to the increasing number of Democratic women in Congress and the lack of growth in the number of Republican women in Congress. There are more than three times as many Democratic than Republican women in the contemporary Congress, but throughout the 1980s women’s representation across the parties was largely the same! Importantly Thomsen develops a theory of “party fit” and shows that more liberal Republican and more conservative Democratic state legislators are less likely to run for Congress, contributing to a more ideological and polarized Congress. Because women Republican legislators tend to be more liberal than male Republican legislators, the result is that fewer Republican women run, which has a direct and negative effect on the representation of Republican women in the US House.

Thomsen’s methodology is diverse, using both quantitative and qualitative data. To address her first question she uses individual data on state legislator’s perceptions of winning and estimates of the ideology of state legislators to examine candidate emergence. She finds that ideology matters more to political ambition than gender, which influences who runs and the party-gender make-up of the Congress. She also examines member retention patterns and finds that more liberal Republicans and more conservative Democrats are more likely to retire, which also has implications for the party‐gender divide.

The committee was impressed with the variety of literature used to weave together a fascinating story about ideology, political parties, candidate emergence and gender, and politics. Most importantly, the committee was impressed with the number of implications that derived from her research, its focus on questions of descriptive and substantive representation at both the micro and macro level, and the value of thinking about the variation among women both theoretically and empirically. These contributions are far-reaching, advancing our understanding of the American political landscape from multiple perspectives while connecting individual decisions to macro political outcomes.